The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

“Ultimately the poem is about the moment at which mere sequence turns consequential; where moments suddenly cohere into the momentous.” —Heather McHugh

Brenda Hillman once said, “Each piece [of a sequence of poems] should be an isolated gem”— A gem that is shaped by the pressure placed on it by the rest of the poems in a sequence. Through repetitions of structure, image and theme, the elongated form of the sequence poem can both suggest and disrupt narrative and create a space where one can explore a topic from multiple directions, styles and voices. What is the urgency of the sequence? What are the cumulative meanings, iterative meanings, and afterlives of a poem read within a sequence? In what ways does a sequence of poems allow us to become emotional historians of the present?

Sara Deniz Akant, Anna V.Q. Ross, Diannely Antigua, Nicole Callihan, Ashna Ali, and Adrienne Raphel all work in this poetic form. In this panel, each poet will share work from recent projects and share the ways in which writing in sequence enlarges and informs their poetic practice. We will end with a Q&A discussion.